Alice in Acidland, a lurid twisted tale taking only the name from the beloved Lewis Carroll story Alice In Wonderland and bastardizing it and morphing it into a classic Propaganda film designed to keep kids, and according to this film, young girls away from the dangers of LSD.
LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) was created in 1938 and was originally used for psychiatric uses around 1947. As its popularity and success grew as a therapeutic agent, the CIA began trials to apply the chemical to mind control and chemical warfare designs. Through their testing on both young servicemen and students the drug took off as a recreational drug to youth culture during the 60s culminating in its eventual prohibition.
Alice in Acidland was made at the height of the fight against LSD in 1969 by John Donne and written by Gertrude Steen. This is one of those Propaganda films that you can watch and tell that the director doesn’t really have any issues with the drug scene while the writer sits on their throne having never dropped acid, never shot up and most importantly never inhaled.
The film is, thankfully, a few minutes shy of being an hour long. Forty-three of the fifty-three minute duration of the film is in shocking Black and White as we learn of Alice’s first invite to a party house. Alice is an honor roll student who has never done a bad thing in her life. Well, while at her first party she is introduced to alcohol, tobacco, pot and lesbian sex. The next time round she gets a ride from her father and then goes and changes into more alluring clothing, a wardrobe fit for the hippie free love generation, a long flowing dress and moccasins. Upon arriving at her second party she throws herself at one of the males in attendance, as if she were magnetically attracted to him.
On Alice’s third go around she starts inviting friends along to the parties she is attending only this time something goes horribly wrong. When Alice arrives this time, everyone takes a blotter tab of LSD. Alice can now feel everything around her, her extremities become amazingly sensitive, her fingertips can feel the air, etc. It’s at this point the film turns on the color. If you’ve ever seen an acid trip in a movie, like Tenacious D’s Pick of Destiny, you’ll be sorely disappointed by this one. It consists of a black room with two naked women who are either dancing around or standing still with no amazing swirls of color or trippy funky music. Alice is starting to have the time of her life as she runs her fingers over the smooth marble of the fireplace mantle. Only trouble is that one of the men has taken her friend into one of the bedrooms and Alice is powerless to protect her and as Alice falls deeper and deeper into her trip into Acidland she realizes her friend has just gotten raped and murdered by the man she introduced her friend to.
It’s at this point the trip, and the movie, ends. We pull out of the darkness and get our final view of Alice as she is in a padded room wearing a straitjacket while the voice over informs us that had she never met those so-called friends who led her down the path to destruction, her friend would still be alive and she would have graduated high school.
That’s the biggest disappointment and also the biggest appeal of Propaganda films for me. They are so blind to any scientific research done towards any drug and automatically preach on how bad they are regardless of the evidence behind them. They are so quick to say that if you have one sip of alcohol when you’re underage you will then smoke cigarettes and then try LSD and end up in a mental ward.
Propaganda films were made to scare the uneducated youth (and their uneducated parents) about any form of immoral action, be it sex, violence, drugs, alcohol or even cheating on a test in school.
Propaganda isn’t about truth; it’s about fear and its fear that built America from the 30s to the 70s. The Public Service Announcements that I grew up watching were finally becoming more truthful in what they preached (minus all of the DARE films we ever had to watch) and that means America is fed up with being lied to. Regardless, Propaganda films are fun to watch! Just because of how ridiculous they were and once you’ve watched a few you can tell which of the actors and directors are actually a lot more open minded than what they portray in these films as they play their characters tongue in cheek as compared to a straight actor really living in their character. (Heath Ledger’s Joker or Jack Nicholson’s Jake from Chinatown best represents an example of the previous statement of straight acting, really getting into the character. Tongue in cheek- Any role from Nicholas Cage.)
Don’t be afraid, watch a couple, they’re normally less than an hour long and who knows, you may learn something.
